occupied with this subject, upon which he
wrote many letters, and a paper of thirty pages, entitled "On
Nullification," which bears the date of 1835-36, the latter year being
the last of his life. He resents the charge of any political
inconsistency in the course of his long career, and most of all such an
inconsistency as would impugn his attachment to the Constitution and the
Union. The resolutions of 1798, he maintains, do not and were not meant
to assert a right in any one State to arrest or annul an act of the
general government, as that is a right that can only belong to them
collectively. Nullification and Secession he denounces as "twin
heresies," that "ought to be buried in the same grave." "A political
system," he declares, "which does not contain an effective provision for
a peaceable decision of all controversies arising within itself would be
a government in name only." He asserts that "the essential difference
between a free government and governments not free is that the former is
founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound
by it. Neither of them, therefore, can have a greater right to break off
from the bargain than the other or others have to hold them to it.... It
is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the
public opinion." What,--he writes to another friend,--"what can be more
preposterous than to say that the States, as united, are in no respect
or degree a nation, which implies sovereignty, ... and on the other
hand, and at the same time, to say that the States separately are
completely nations and sovereigns?... The words of the Constitution are
explicit, that the Constitution and laws of the United States shall be
supreme over the Constitution and laws of the several States; supreme in
their exposition and execution, as well as in their authority. Without a
supremacy in these respects, it would be like a scabbard, in the hand of
a soldier, without a sword in it." Abraham Lincoln might have said this
twenty-eight years later when he determined that his first duty as
President was to suppress insurrection.

Such is the drift of the many pages Mr. Madison wrote upon the subject
during the last five or six years of his life. He looked then, whatever
he may have thought in the closing years of the preceding century, upon
the United States as a nation, and not as a confederacy having its parts
held together only by "a treaty or league" called a con